


Carmilla & Danny as Gryffindors (and foils)

by lesbians_and_puns



Series: Meta [2]
Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: Analysis, Character Analysis, Meta, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-06
Updated: 2015-10-06
Packaged: 2018-04-25 04:10:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4946173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesbians_and_puns/pseuds/lesbians_and_puns
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I use Wicked to make some points here, but even if you're not familiar with the musical, you should still be able to follow the analysis.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Carmilla & Danny as Gryffindors (and foils)

**Author's Note:**

> I use Wicked to make some points here, but even if you're not familiar with the musical, you should still be able to follow the analysis.

My beta, figurativelycaring, and I both sort Danny as a Gryffindor and Carmilla as a “stripped Gryffindor,” according to the sortinghatchats sorting system. To quote their blog:

> But for the Gryffindor, Stripping is not a steadying act, no matter how it seems to outward observers. Gryffindor is a House of certainty. Gryffindor is a House of right and wrong, of those truths requiring action. When a Gryffindor is Stripped, their sense of right and wrong is yanked out of their gut. They lose the certainty of their moral compass.

I’ve written about Carmilla’s morality and philosophy before, and [that post](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4945879) might give you some context about what I’m talking about here. Essentially, Danny is unfailingly certain of what is right and what is wrong, often taking it to an extreme and/or jumping to conclusions because she’s using her gut and not her head. And what we think is that Carmilla used to be more like that - probably not to that extreme, but I think it’s hard to argue that Carmilla doesn’t have an inner moral compass and doesn’t know right from wrong, or even that she doesn’t act on it. It’s more that she has seen so much horror and pain and saw herself turned into a monster (think for a minute about what it would be like to have an inner sense of right and wrong and then be turned and go through bloodlust and come to your senses only to realize how many people you’ve killed… that would fuck with anyone’s sense of their own goodness) and that has stripped her of her ability to trust herself.

So Carmilla and Danny are foils in a way; Danny represents an extreme version of what Carmilla could have been. She has been able to retain that righteousness but Carmilla has lost it, or lost her ability to trust it. And it’s so, so sad, because she does try to do to the right thing - her love for Laura spurs her past the desensitized apathy. She’s saved various people her mother has targeted before without loving them because she knows it’s right, she’s just too tired and has seen too much to fight blindly for a cause she knows will lose. And figurativelycaring pointed out to me the other day a crucial difference between Carmilla and Mattie: Carmilla says “You know how you get to be centuries old? You pick your battles,” whereas Mattie says “You know how you get to be centuries old? You don’t judge.” Mattie has stopped judging things on the basis of right and wrong, whereas that’s just a part of who Carmilla is - she’s just given up believing that she can pursue the moral option in every circumstance. She’s tired and cynical and jaded but that doesn’t mean she has lost her moral compass, she just doesn’t trust it (or possibly, more fundamentally, she doesn’t trust her ability to pursue it and therefore it’s too dangerous to think about.) Mattie has abandoned her morality. She’s just done. But Carmilla… Carmilla _picks her battles. _She’s still fighting the good fight even if she’s too tired to make it a moral crusade the way Danny does.__

It’s my headcanon that in Wicked, Elphaba’s reaction to Fiyero’s death is fundamentally the same as Carmilla’s reaction to Ell’s death. She tries desperately to save her and she fails, even makes it worse for her in some ways, and I am absolutely sure she blames herself. “Fiyero, where are you? Already dead or bleeding? One more disaster I can add to my generous supply…”

And that’s when she gives up. (Obviously, as I just said before, she doesn’t give up completely, but nor does Elphaba no matter her promises in this song so it’s kind of a moot point.) At the very least, this is where Carmilla and Elphaba give up pretenses and become bitter, burned, stripped. She tried to do the right thing, she fucking tried, she was going to take Ell and run away the way that Elphaba tried to run with Fiyero and it backfired horrifically. “No good deed goes unpunished…”

Honestly the biggest connection between them is the climax of the song - “Let all Oz be agreed: I’m wicked through and through since I could not succeed, Fiyero, saving you; I promise no good deed will I attempt to do again, ever again.”

Carmilla watches the love of her life die because she fucked up (with the added twist that Ell thought she was a monster, that Ell turned from her, that Carmilla’s worst suspicions about herself were confirmed by the person she loved), and she gives up trying because what good is it anyway, to try to do the right thing, when you only make it worse and it hurts so much more that way?

Then Elphaba sings about her own doubt of her own moral compass - “Was I really seeking good or just seeking attention?” - and I think that Carmilla does this in a lot of ways too. She judges herself incredibly harshly. She fails to live up to her own moral standards so she abandons them (but only in theory, as she still practices them - again, she is saving girls even before Laura comes along).

Her quote about ethics is honestly very telling - while she says that “ethics are a ridiculous game played by children who think they can impose order on an arbitrary universe,” she’s being awfully hypocritical, if for no other reason then because the girl loves Camus - she’s an absurdist through-and-through. She believes the core principle of absurdism, that while the universe is arbitrary and meaningless and therefore to pursue meaning is to be in conflict with reality (it is an absurd goal, hence the name), you should embrace and rebel against that duality by creating meaning where you know there is none. Just like Elphaba, her black-and-white view of the universe (if in fact she ever had one) is totally stripped away by how much of her life is characterized by pain and loss, but even when that is taken away and she believes that the universe is arbitrary and meaningless she still retains a belief, whether or not she believes that belief is absurd, in meaning, in morality, even when she distrusts her ability to know what it is or to pursue it. While she (and Elphaba) may appear to give up, neither actually does. They continue reaching to do the right thing where they can even when they are reeling from the fact that what used to be an unshakable moral compass has now dropped out from under their feet.


End file.
